The business and culture of our digital lives, from the L.A. Times

German company posts online guide for digitizing a foosball table

The foosball table, long a favorite of bar patrons and college students, had pretty much missed the digital age. After all, it can be hard to improve a classic first patented in America in the 1920s.

But SinnerSchrader, a German-based technology company, tried anyway.

In a how-to guide posted online, employees demonstrated how to retrofit a foosball table with a circuit board, photo sensors and some open source code. The end result: a wired table that can sense when a ball crosses the goal line and can update scores automatically online via an app, also developed by the company.

"Okay, maybe it is a crazy idea to connect a foosball table to the internet," the primer said. "But once you manage to get the table online, you can do all sorts of amazing things with it."

SinnerSchrader has yet to post a detailed, step-by-step list of instructions, but they promise that the software and guide is soon to come. Estimated cost of materials will be around $200. Estimated time -- who knows? Even the simplest blueprint might be gibberish to anyone but tech savants.